1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network terminal including a plurality of web servers that gather information about software or hardware resources of the network terminal in accordance with a request from another network terminal and provides the information to the requestor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multifunction peripherals (MFP) are becoming popular on the market. A typical MFP is provided with a scanner function, a facsimile function, and a printer function so that a single device serves as a scanner, a facsimile, and a printer.
FIG. 1 is a functional block diagram of a conventional MFP. As shown in FIG. 1, the conventional MFP 50 includes a user interface portion (user I/F) 51, a printer portion 52, a scanner portion 53, a control portion 54, a telephone circuit portion 61, and a LAN interface portion 62. The user interface portion 51 includes a liquid crystal display, key switches, and the like. The liquid crystal display is provided for displaying the status of and methods of operating the MFP 50. The key switches are provided for inputting commands into the MFP 50. The printer portion 52 is provided for printing on print sheets stored in the MFP 50. The scanner portion 53 retrieves text, photographs and the like as image data. The control portion 54 governs the user interface portion 51, the printer portion 52, and the scanner portion 53. The telephone circuit portion 61 is provided for connecting the control portion 54 to the Internet or to an external facsimile machine that is connected to a public telephone line. The LAN interface portion 62 is connected to a local area network (LAN) to which the MFP 50 is connected.
The MFP 50 configured as described above uses a plurality of CPUs individually in different portions of the MFP 50 to control the MFP 50 in a divided manner, so that the overall processing performance of the MFP 50 is enhanced. Specifically, each of the control portion 54 and the LAN interface portion 62 includes a CPU, a RAM, a ROM, an I/O, and a serial interface (serial I/F). The user interface portion 51, the printer portion 52, and the scanner portion 53 are controlled by the CPU 55 of the control portion 54. Communication between the MFP 50 and the LAN is controlled by the CPU 63 of the LAN interface portion 62.
The CPU 55 of the control portion 54 executes programs for controlling each portion governed by the CPU 55 and also an information gathering program 56 for gathering information about the status of each portion. Also, the CPU 63 of the LAN interface portion 62 executes programs relating to transmission control and also a web server program 64. The web server program will be referred to as “web server” hereinafter. The web server 64 gathers information about the LAN interface portion 62, information about each portion governed by the CPU 55 of the control portion 54, and the like according to a request from a terminal connected to the LAN and provides the information to the requester. It should be noted that the information gathering program 56 is executed by the CPU 55 in response to a request from the web server 64, gathers information from each portion governed by the CPU 55, and transmits the information to the web server 64. With the web server 64, the MFP 50 can provide information about each portion of the MFP 50 to terminals connected to the MFP 50 through the LAN.
However, the following disadvantages have been noted with respect to the MFP 50 configured as described above. First, when new operational functions, such as a video capture function for capturing video images from a video camera or video deck, are added to the MFP so with the above-described configuration, the information gathering program 56 and the web server 64 must be expanded so as to make it possible to provide information related to the added operational function across the LAN to the terminals connected to the MFP 50. More specifically, information about newly added operational functions must be added to the information gathering program 56 and the web server 64 as a new program function and the processes of the program must be rearranged to enable the newly added function to process. The more program functions are added, the greater is the labor required to add or rearrange the programs. Therefore, it has not been easy to expand operational functions.
Second, while the information gathering program 56 of the MFP 50 gathered information about each portion governed by the control portion 54, it was the web server 64 that converted the gathered information into a web page format and transmitted the converted information to the requester and that governed information about the entire MFP 50. For this reason, the processing burden on the web server 64 increases. If the web server 64 is expanded, then the CPU 63 will be troubled by processes of the web server 64 so there is a potential problem that execution of other programs will be influenced.
A newly functioning portion may be provided with a CPU. In such a case, to gather information about the newly functioning portion with an information gathering program executed by the CPU of the newly functioning portion, there is a need to add a transmission interface program to the web server in order to communicate with the information gathering program.